George Washington Carver: A National Agricultural Library Digital Exhibit

1915

National Agricultural Library

The purpose of this bulletin is to set forth simple exercises with plants and animals arranged after a monthly sequence plan for the first five grades in southern rural schools. The monthly sequence plan is followed so that plants and animals may be studied at a time when they are most interesting. The monthly exercises provide work for each of the first five grades of the public school. Practical exercises and field trips are suggested. If the best results are to be obtained each pupil should be required to have notebooks and keep records of the observations made and the information secured. In connection with each exercise correlations with other subjects are given. These are intended to be suggestive, but if the idea is followed out and supplemented the ordinary public school branches may be greatly vitalized. It is intended that this publication shall serve as an approach to the study of formal or textbook agriculture in the upper elementary grades.

It is to be understood that this is in no sense a textbook, but a guide for the teacher. There may be communities to which all the exercises given here are not adapted, but in that event they should prove sufficiently suggestive to be helpful to the teacher in planning work that may be substituted. Nothing definite is said concerning the place this work should take in the daily program, but it is suggested that the period of one or two regular classes be used once or twice each week. In other words, it need not be treated as an additional subject in the curriculum but for the sake of its own importance and the vitalizing influence on the other public school subjects this work should be substituted for one or two other recitations each week in the several grades.

Exercises With Plants and Animals for Southern Rural Schools